Weird Science drugs its snails, keeps its zebras on the beach

As we ponder whether to turn this column over to the Journal of Experimental …

If coke doesn't give you satisfaction, try meth: I'm not sure whether to praise the Journal of Experimental Biology or to complain vociferously about it. The journal appears to be a veritable fountain of weirdness, having supplied us with our earlier coverage of mice trained to detect the body odor of chickens, and offering a study in the latest issue that involved showing videos of crickets to salamanders in order to determine if they could distinguish large numbers. (The answer is yes, provided that the quantities differ by a 2:1 ratio or higher.)

But the journal apparently recognizes the weirdness of its own offerings, and sends out press releases announcing some of the stranger ones. And then it waits a while after the release before it places the content online. Thus, we didn't provide full coverage of a report on the ability of spitting cobras to track hapless PhDs simply because the paper wasn't yet online when Weird Science was being prepared.

New week, same story: JEB offers up a fantastically weird press release describing a research group that tested the impact of meth on the ability of snails to remember how to breathe. The training involved poking the hapless snails with sticks. Perfect material, but the paper is nowhere to be found on the journal's website. Fortunately, the search function pulled up the next best thing: a paper in which the same group did the exact same research, but gave the snails coke instead. Both drugs seem to impact the ability of snails to forget stuff.

Maybe we can test this by sticking some zebras in six feet of ocean on a Sunday: This one's from a book, so we only have the press release to go on, but it seems pretty solid. Researchers ran the numbers on every shark attack on a section of the Florida coast since 1956, and came up with the typical conditions at the time of the bite. "Shark attacks are most likely to occur on Sunday, in less than six feet of water, during a new moon and involve surfers wearing black and white bathing suits," according to the analysis.

Does basso profundo get the girl?: It's easy to find a nature program that will give you a nice, clinical description of male dominance displays and mating success. Look hard enough, and you can find that same clinical detachment applied to human males, where it leads to some rather surreal sounding phrases like "Vocal masculinity strongly affected dominance ratings, but a man’s own dominance did not alter his attention to vocal masculinity when assessing dominance." Men pay attention to voices, and assume a deep, bass rumble is indicative of a dominant male, regardless of how confident they are in their own dominance. But, when it comes to rating relative positions on the social hierarchy, the key factor is testosterone levels.

They're vanishing just as I became aware of them: I'm well aware of the lungfish that evolved evolved limb-like fins and eventually left the water behind. But I was surprised to find out that they weren't the last fish to go this route. There's an entire clade of species called "handfish" that exist only near Australia, where they casually stroll the ocean floor, as this one's doing at right. "50 million years ago, they 'walked' the world's oceans, but now they exist only off eastern and southern Australia," said an Australian taxonomist.

Fitting bees with radio collars: Well, not really radio collars, but the authors of a paper on the foraging habits of solitary tropical bees claim to be the first to have provided radio telemetry data on the daily travels of male orchid bees. Although the bees went up to five kilometers from their tagging site, they also had long periods where they were essentially stationary, suggesting a degree of what the authors term "site fidelity." But the best aspect of the work is clearly this video of the authors supergluing miniaturized radio transmitters onto these rather large bees, setting them loose, and then barreling through the forest after them like they're refilming the Blair Witch Project.